Glossolalia
by lifeundecided
Summary: For a girl gifted with life, she is unnaturally acquainted with death. She thinks Jesus felt the same, though.


_Author's Note: As posted on fuckyeahahscoven, but I can only hope you already knew that. If you didn't, it's a tumblr. And it's awesome._

Physics teachers taught of the Big Bang, that farcical eruption of something from nothing without the intervention of any sort of higher power. Biology teachers drew diagrams of the human body with no mention of the immortal soul, no nooks or crannies in which it could reside, lining the skull, someplace dark and quiet in the various valves of the heart. Geography teachers gave no indication as to where, exactly, Heaven and Hell could be found on a map. They also told her that the hurricanes which ravaged her home town were products of air currents and changing pressures, rather than acts of God against those who rejected His teachings. Her father did not see eye to eye with the school board. Her attendance was erratic, spotted, wavering. Her faith was not.

The school chaplain was a distant family friend who smiled at her during Mass, and the split second of extra pressure when he pressed the Sacrament into her hand kept Misty's head high as she stalked back to her place in the pews between girls with too short skirts and boys with dirty fingernails who didn't know Leviticus from Lot.

On Saturday mornings she baked for Sunday afternoons and on Sunday afternoons in the damp heat of too many bodies murmuring low sounds, sweat dripping down upraised arms, she prayed that Monday would be kinder.

When she was fourteen her dog was found dead on the bank of the river by her house. She cried for three days and on the fourth, when she picked up the old leash and collar, her mother snapped at her for being childish, being weak. She gestured to the door, and said "She's waiting."

There was a hole in the ground where the dog's makeshift grave should have been and a ratty tennis ball being thrown in the yard and the familiar sound of Misty's peculiar whistle that nobody else could seem to replicate. It had the neighborhood dogs come running and the overhead cables bending under the weight of so many birds. Disney told her that by rights that should make her a princess.

So the dog is not dead and she likes to think that there's a Biblical significance in her gift. She likes to think that she's been blessed like the Thornton boy a few years back, whose mother refused to believe that he'd contracted AIDS by elicit means, that it was a Test (the proper noun bitten out and made obvious by the way she bowed her head and clutched her chest): that prayer would put him right. He wouldn't touch the medicines his uncle remortgaged his house for.

Word went around on the back of a Tupperware box full of casserole "for that poor family" that the boy was days away from death. Misty gave him a get well card, crayon and tissue paper flowers, and as lingering a kiss on the cheek as was allowed. She left a smear of chocolate on his face and three days later he was cured.

Her father put it down to faith and scowled whenever the uncle's name was mentioned. He doesn't come to church any more. Misty doesn't remember his name.

…..

At seventeen she's the school's resident basket case, Bible basher, everybody assumes she practices Wicca or something equally trippy and pseudo primitive Earth Mother blasphemous; she adds another cross around her neck and starts to ask God for someone who understands.

The woods and the swamps are littered with bones and the wet, rancid corpses of small animals. She breathes life through her palms and puts all of her babysitting money in the collection tin full of quarters and the occasional ten dollar bill from inquisitive out-of-towers.

Those preaching make nice with smiles and the word of God and rattle alms boxes under their noses until the frightened and godless duck out without so much as crossing themselves.

Around Christmas a friend of her sister's starts speaking in phrases like "The Lord God sayeth." He starts asking people to call him Aviel in private and some of the younger ones snicker when they're told to pay some respect. Her grandmother mutters about the coming of a prophet and Misty wonders how this new found grace has come so suddenly.

When he stands in the school cafeteria with eyes closed and arms outstretched his shouts are louder than the laughter of her peers.

He catches her eye before he falls to the ground and he drops out of school for a month.

When she sees him next his hands are moving over the eyes of a pregnant woman who suffers acute morning sickness each and every time her husband decides to add to their brood. She smiles around teeth that seem too big for her thinning face (because this time they're saying it's twins, and it's sapping the life from her), saying that her children are a gift from God.

By next service the sickness has stopped and she's pressing kisses into the red cheeks of Nathan Kennedy.

The name he was born with is the only thing she'll call him and where the girls her age follow after him with Bible references on their tongues as if to entice him to bed with the Ten Commandments she's uneasy.

When she picks up dog food and Bud Light from the store at the end of the road he's there, leaning against the counter with a lock of the check-out girl's bleached hair around his finger.

He stiffens when she slams the bottles down and taps twice on the plastic counter top by way of farewell. She watches him walk away and stares at the crushed face of a founding father in her hand rather than the slack scowl of the girl punching in numbers and swiping bar codes a little too violently.

When she chips a lurid green nail on a bottle cap Misty smiles, lips pressed together, hands over her money and walks out of the store, bent awkwardly under the manageable weight, not so manageable size of her purchases.

The walk home is slow and she returns to the kitchen to find a pot on the stove and her little community's newest brightest and blessed at the table with a perspiring can of Coke.

Her mother comments on how tall he's grown, how she can barely believe it's the same little boy who used to break her plant pots with poorly aimed soccer balls.

Misty doesn't remember ever seeing him around before the age of fifteen. She learns later that night, while serving up indeterminate meat and wilting vegetables, that Nathan was a sick child; his miraculous recovery from some sort of rare cancer came about as he began to speak in tongues.

Her bedroom is small and there is a patch of damp above her bed from the attic. She believes that there are rats in the walls and presses her hands to the peeling paper from time to time, sensing and sending waves of vitality in the general direction of her furry lodgers. Dead rats smell worse than live ones, and she'd rather have them breed than be stuck rotting.

She can tell when there's a thread of life still intact, straining until the last possible second, always ready to be pulled back. None of the people at school who pulled her hair or her rosaries had ever taken her by surprise. She can hear them, the pulsing and the buzzing and the soft, wet, flow of blood around a body. Nerve impulses under seven layers of skin feel, to her, like electricity thrumming under rubber.

Her father said goodnight to Nathan an hour ago at the front door with a handshake. Nathan put his palm over her father's forehead in a gesture that seemed infinitely patronizing, infinitely too old, but her father closes his eyes and makes a cross over his heart.

"Your old man has a brain tumor."

She knows that.

Just like she knew when she stepped foot inside her bedroom that he was behind her door, just out of sight, but not out of inner earshot.

"And you can't do anything about it until he's dead or almost dead."

"How did you know?"

"It's like I'm wearing a headset all the time, but all calls are incoming, and they're all from the same person. I don't get to choose what I'm told. It just happens."

"I think you should leave."

"And I think I should tell your parents you're a witch."

She flushes because she's had the same thought, but he doesn't have to know that.

"If it was God-given you'd tell everybody you were touched by Jesus or something. But you've been touched by something else. What'd you do? Draw a pentagram, couple of candles, bunch your skirt up and ask the devil for your dog back?"

"I'm not a witch."

"He says you are."

If she was in the habit of swearing she'd say horse shit but that would take too many Hail Mary's to ever be worth it.

"I wear a Crucifix. I go to Church. I have holy water all over my house."

But he's up off the floor, where he sat back against the wall, arms linked over his knees. Toward the door, hand on the knob.

"You should tell him, you know. That he's dying. Before it's too late."

…..

Easter Sunday marks an extra long service and a barbecue that's held half in the church hall, out of the sun, half out on the grass, a stout stone wall away from all the dead bodies they've managed to churn out in recent years.

She's mixing potato salad when the spoon is plucked from her grip and she looks up into the face of Nathan Kennedy. She's singing Edge of Seventeen under her breath and turns her back when he reaches out to pluck a drop of mayonnaise from her hair.

When she slaps at him he catches her wrist, or thinks that he will; he's distracted in reaching for her hand, so she stands on his foot and walks outside, grabbing the bowl as she goes.

Her sister Josephine is convinced he's in love with her.

She fixes his hair over meat and potatoes while his hand reaches for Misty's knee below the table. He's waiting in her living room most nights when she gets home from her walks in nature, and she's taken to keeping a toothbrush by the kitchen sink, because sleeping in her own room is not an option.

He leaves Bible excerpts along the same vein as 'thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" strewn across her bed and she can hear his laughter from beyond the door. He sleeps in Jo's bedroom when her parents are out of town. She doesn't want to be the one to break it to her mother that her baby girl can't wear a white dress.

When she escapes through the hall to the church itself, coins in her pocket ready to light a candle or two, to pray for foresight in the coming weeks (her grandmother is on her last legs, but she wants to be around to quietly offer her services so the old woman can see another Christmas), he's there.

Her senses are dulled in the church, smothered by so much heavy stone and the ever present stench of death that rolls out of the cemetery ground to assault her nose.

He snakes a broad hand around her wrist and pulls, leading her, tripping and dizzy, disoriented by the thrum of his heart in a place so quiet, so unnaturally still.

She has never felt someone so alive.

It's in him, the Holy Spirit, the tongues of fire that shine like a beacon. If she ever doubted, he's the reason her faith is reaffirmed. He's staked his claim on her sister, a dull wedding band and promises of a diamond and squeals in the night when Misty lays in bed with windows wide open and sweat dripping from her finger tips, making trails across bare skin and shining in her hair.

It doesn't particularly matter in this moment, when he closes the door of a confession booth behind them, drags a fingertip across her collarbone, mouths at her neck.

"What happened to fornication being sinful?"

"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, too, but that's never stopped me."

"Who am I supposedly married to?"

"Death. Or the devil. I'm not sure yet."

His hands are at her waist, a vice that anchors her to him, unable to arch her back or wriggle free or slap him like she should want. Her sundress is thin, already damp. She's standing and shaking while he kneels and she wonders whether his mouth feels the same on her sister's thigh; if his hands curl around the elastic of her underwear just as slow. The way he sucks in his breath at the first touch of slick skin tells her she's wetter than the girl who used to change her nappies.

When he stands, moves to trap her in the cage of his arms, there's the metallic slide of a zip and the sound of dress pants against skin, belt clacking. Her underwear is half off when she keens around the wet tear of his body in hers. She's tense, stiff shoulders, grasping hands and nails breaking skin. She doesn't use words like cunt or dick because they do things to her insides, uneasy and unclean. She prefers the medical or the Biblical terminology.

They've had chats, mother to daughter, squirming and red faced and promises that they're equally uncomfortable with all things ornithological and melittological. She's been given moral rather than biological lessons and the protection of the Holy Spirit rather than of rubber.

When he huffs against her neck she remembers snippets of things she's not supposed to hear, about how it's harder for girls, takes longer, takes more attention. Attention she's not going to get in a confession booth, pressed up against a flimsy wall, gritting her teeth against the push and pull of something she's never seen outside of a diagram on a page.

He groans and pulls out, leaving a sticky trail across her thigh, connecting the dots of her bruises, a spattering of tiny purple blooms that she can't feel just yet.

He leaves her slumped against the door with tears pooling in her cupped hands. She feels unfaithful, to her sister, to her family outside making nice with the other churchgoers, to Death.

Because when all is said and done she cheats him enough, and anything else is more than she should ever have wished for.

…..

There, in her abdomen, is another hum. A different sound, higher, beating faster than the sluggish sound of life pumping listlessly through her body.

When she found her dog, it had been six weeks pregnant. Its stomach had been slit open, poked and prodded with a stick that lay abandoned by its head. Empty.

Monday brought a locker that dripped red waste to the floor and a quiet knock on the janitor's door when she asked for a cloth and newspaper. She skipped class and waited til the corridor was empty to scoop up seven tiny bodies from the floor of her locker. She cleaned it herself with hot water patiently salvaged from the girls' bathroom, from the taps that ran cold despite the red rim around the metal, bar a thirty second burst of scalding water every ten minutes.

She took them to the swamp, as she always did. She put on Stevie Nicks, like she always did. Lay out a rosary and a candle and said a Glory Be over the bodies. She took the three that came back home in her schoolbag and slid the rest into the waiting water.

She made forty five dollars and put it towards fixing the damp in her ceiling.

When she shows her mother the bruises and tells her what she and the blessed boy have done there are tears in her eyes and the whisper of "whore" on her tongue.

When the thrumming in her womb sputters and stops she does not weep. Who could love a child conceived in secret, in a fog of lust, in the back of a church?

Her sister's engagement is not terminated.

A doctor is found, hushed up, a back bedroom consultation and early morning trip to the local hospital. A medical waste bag is sealed and she feels almost nothing, just the tug of a last string from her body, like an unraveling hem.

She is eighteen.

She is a bridesmaid in Fall, when the heat nears its worst, and her sister sweats her face off, her coiffed hair melts, and she struggles to dance on swollen feet.

Misty smokes a tiny joint in the cemetery with a distant cousin and pushes him away when his wandering hands stir something in the pit of her stomach.

She looks at her dog, the one with seven phantom babies, dead or not, doesn't matter, the one who's dying again, for real this time, of an ulcer in her stomach which is ready to rupture at any point.

The tumor in her father's brain is killing him faster than her dog. She is not sure whether she will cry at his funeral.

For a girl gifted with life, she is unnaturally acquainted with death. She thinks Jesus felt the same, though.


End file.
